Road Warriors: A Scandurro Story

ROAD WARRIORS, BY TIM SCANDURRO

“We’re ready to get on the plane and get home.  We’re a tired bunch.”—Jon Sumrall after Tulane’s 34-3 victory over Charlotte on Halloween Night

“When I heard that we were getting two days off, I was like, thank you because I needed that.  All of us needed that.”—Makhi Hughes after the Charlotte game

I don’t know about you, but I don’t handle airplane travel as well as I used to.  You’re often waking up at an ungodly hour.  You may not have slept much waiting on the alarm clock.  There might be time for a hurried breakfast and some coffee, but the appropriate percolation of those items along with the rest of a gentleman’s treasured morning rituals are either rushed or nonexistent.

Then there’s the flight itself.  Airlines pressurize the air in the cabin, but not to sea-level pressures.  You’re taking in less oxygen, which can make you feel drained and dehydrated when you land.  If the time zone changed, you lost an hour on the clock and perhaps another one on the runway, on top of your lost sleep.  And good luck finding the latter that first night in a strange hotel room.  I read somewhere that evolution hardwired that into our ancestors.  New cave, new potential dangers, so sleep with one eye open and watch out for bears.

Even more than gentlemen of a certain age, football coaches and teams are creatures of routine.  They like structure and predictability, not chaos.  Back-to-back road games can put severe stress on the whole operation.   Forget about the football part for a second.  The moving of a team across the country is a huge logistical ordeal, from getting everyone on the bus to the airport, to keeping everyone fed and hydrated and rested, to getting the right equipment from the home city to the road city, to getting the last minute meetings and preparations done, to getting transportation arranged from the hotel to the stadium and from there back to the airport.  There is typically a written calendar that details to the minute the exact schedule everyone will follow from the time they wake up to the time they go to bed.  Our Director of Football Operations Jeremiah Cartwright and his staff have to organize and execute plans for over a hundred people, when you add in the travel party.  It may not be quite as daunting as Eisenhower planning the Normandy invasion, but it’s a lot.  I’m barely scratching the surface of this undertaking and it has to be seen to be believed. I can remember how hard it was just to get two kids organized and out the door to school.  

Then you have the players.  At a school like Tulane University, they have classes and tests and homework to tend to, among other obligations.  And by midseason, none of them is completely healthy.  They all need rest and sleep and treatment and what modern America calls a ‘self-care regimen’ to recover and perform at their best, and they have to fit all of this stuff in after getting home from the airport late and turning around six days later and heading back out again.  It’s a lot to manage.

Last but certainly not least, you have the coaches.  On the flight back from the first road game, they aren’t celebrating or catching up on sleep or listening to music.  They are on their iPads and laptops getting ready for the next opponent.  They have to break down the game they just played, come up with a plan to attack the next opponent, and figure out how to keep the players fresh while also installing the game plan for that week and having the team rep it enough to be comfortable.

Now let’s add another plot twist.  Instead of doing all of this on a normal seven-day schedule, you have to do it in five.  And instead of playing in the daytime as your routine has been for the past seven weeks, you are going to play the second road game at night.   And it will be on ESPN at a place that has never hosted such a game, so it’s going to be a big event for the attention-starved home team, its sleeveless coach and its student body who will all be juiced up for the occasion.

That’s the situation the Tulane football program found itself in this past week, with a Halloween night game in Charlotte following a Saturday road game at North Texas.  So much for the conference office looking out for its national standard bearer.

Many studies have shown that sleep deprivation and fatigue are costly to human beings, body and soul.  Sleep-loss and fatigue-related causes account for over $400 billion in economic losses in this country annually.  Drivers who have slept less than four hours the night before are 11 times more likely to be involved in an accident.  Sluggishness and loss of concentration, focus, energy and reaction time are the culprits.  Note how directly each of those qualities translate to the game day performance of both football players and the men on the sidelines leading them.

Our coaches were in the Wilson Center working well into the wee hours of Sunday morning after the North Texas game.  They were back in the office again before 6 AM Sunday morning.  Thus began a week that epitomized the adage ‘no rest for the weary.’  In a normal game week these coaches often work until midnight and get in by 6 AM, but this short week was not normal and would demand more from all of them. 

Predictably, Thursday night’s game started a little slowly.  On the sideline, Coach Sumrall often runs on pure adrenaline, his neck sometimes engaged in a desperate battle to keep his veins from popping through it.  Thursday night he looked uncharacteristically subdued when the camera found him.  And yet as the game wore on, it was like watching a python eat a pig on a nature documentary.  At first the pig has plenty of wiggle and life, and maybe a chance to break free.   But as the coils get tighter and reality begins to set in, the ultimate outcome becomes obvious to everyone, most clearly to the pig.  Thursday wasn’t as sudden or as dazzling as a cobra strike, but it was equally lethal and dominantly so.  “Tulane is a very physical football team,” said a demoralized Charlotte Coach Biff Poggi afterwards in his press conference.  “Tulane is a powerhouse….[my team] is pretty heartbroken downstairs.”

It's hard to describe a 34-3 game as ‘gutting out a win,’ but it was still an extraordinary display of physical and mental toughness by a group of driven men and women in our football program who got on two airplanes in the span of four days and won two football games convincingly.

Most of you probably know that Coach Sumrall and his wife Ginny have four children.  You may not know that Coach Craddock and Coach Gasparato, our two young coordinators who helped lead that suffocating win over Charlotte, have five children between them under the age of eight (two for Coach Craddock, three for Coach Gas).  Playing on Thursday night out of town meant that back in New Orleans where Halloween is celebrated with uncommon exuberance every year, their kids had to experience it without them.  These coaches won’t have a memory this year of rolling a wagon down the street and watching their costumed kids, eyes lit up with excitement, having their buckets filled by a smiling neighbor and then proudly hearing them say ‘thank you’.

But they will have the sweet memory of putting in backbreaking work to accomplish a remarkably difficult task and imprinting the same accomplishment into the collective memory of each of us.  It’s a little sad that  our coaches didn’t get to hear their kids say ‘thank you’ on Halloween Night in New Orleans, but after what they just achieved it would be tragic if they didn’t hear it from us.  If you see one of them around town, take time to let them know how much you appreciate the way they have poured themselves into our football program.  They got home exhausted from Charlotte  at O’Dark Thirty some time in the small hours of Friday morning, and gave the players a couple days off.  But for the coaches, it was right back to work Friday afternoon and evening looking at high school players who can strengthen our football team in the years to come.  These are the kinds of people we have the special privilege and obligation to support.  Workers and winners.

Now the team gets to come back home and play next Saturday in front of a sold-out homecoming crowd.  They worked hard for that.  They deserve that.  They’ve earned that, players and coaches and support staff, each and every one of them. 

"I firmly believe that any man's finest hour is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle, victorious."—Vince Lombardi